(Newser)
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In the future, we won’t truck our food across the country—we’ll shoot it through underground tubes at more than 60 miles an hour. Or at least, that’s the dream of Foodtubes, a UK-based group of academics, engineers, and project planners. It may sound like science fiction, but they say the tube-based food transport system they’ve dreamed up is actually feasible, cost effective, and environmentally friendly.

Foodtubes is touting the system as a “transport Internet.” Food would be put into capsules, then shot through a 2,000-mile pipe system to neighborhoods around the UK. The whole thing would be controlled by a “smart grid” to avoid crashes, io9 explains. The result: food trucks would be taken off the road, meaning 40 million tons less carbon entering the atmosphere. If the whole world switched to the system, the carbon savings would be a whopping 4 billion tons.